Property Rights – Self ownership

I. Self Ownership
Ownership is the right to control what happens to something. It also tells who is responsible for something. Most people would be willing to admit that they have ownership in themselves. Our very words like “myself” imply ownership. It basically means this self is mine. You own yourself. I own myself. What are the consequences of not owning yourself? A few logical options are available.

1. Another person owns you
If someone else owns you, this is some form of slavery. I think in modern times we can all agree that slavery is not to be desired. But, even back in the day when slavery was viewed as acceptable, it was only really only a partial form of ownership. Slaves were still responsible for their actions at least to some extent. Slave owners did not have full control over what the slave did. This is why they often did mean and cruel things to motivate the slaves to do what they wanted.

2. Everyone owns you
Hopefully this one comes across as absurd. This is basically some form of communist/slavery fusion. How could every person have some ownership in every other person? Could an individual in China actually claim to have some sort of right to ownership of an individual in Canada, when they have no knowledge of each others existence? Even if everyone did own each other, each individual would still have a minute piece of ownership in themselves. How much ownership would each person have and how would one arrive at this conclusion? Would it be split up evenly or would certain people have more ownership than others?

3. No one owns anyone (including themselves)
This is another pretty absurd one. How can any person be responsible for any actions? How can any actions have any meaning? If a person has no ownership in themselves can any of this language make sense? Words like myself and yourself have no meaning. This appears to be some sort of nihilistic/communist view.
Good luck getting a communist to tell you which they want. They seem to constantly juggle between wanting to eliminate property and mutual ownership of property. They both lead to absurd conclusions but the reasoning is a bit different. Some communists may also accept self ownership but then they are just inconsistent when ownership applies to other things.

4.Mixture
There may be some trying to mix these ideas but that would just lead to a mixture of these problems. While I have seen people try to argue for these alternatives, this mixed view seems to prevail without people directly advocating it. This is largely because of lack of understanding of self ownership. It’s like people generally believe they own themselves unless x issue then unfounded exception. So, “I own you” , “you own me”, “we all own each other”, “no one owns anyone”. People think ownership changes based on circumstance, but no one can agree on who the owner is. How could this possibly be true unless a person already violated the ownership of another? We can see this by how people react when something bad happens. Who is responsible for the actions? Is it the person who directly did the action? Is it some group that the person may or may not be part of? Is everyone at fault? no one? a tool? society?
People may not admit to holding to any of these views because people seem to debate things on a more superficial level. These ideas seem to be on a deeper level of people thinking without them really realizing it.

The ideas for this article were based on some stuff in For a New Liberty

part 2 here